Xastir by RPM

Xastir is now included in the Fedora Distribution!
Thanks to the efforts of the guys over at the Fedora Amateur Radio Special Interest Group, Xastir is included in the Fedora repositories. You can install Xastir simply by using the command:

sudo yum install xastir

See the Sudo notes for help in setting up sudo.If you're not familiar with sudo, See links and notes below

This will install all the requisite libraries and the Xastir binaries.

If you want to use more than the default maps and online maps, you'll need to download maps as described in README.MAPS .

Regardless of using the RPM or CVS version, you'll need to configure Xastir for your use - see the built in 'help' system for details.

If you want the latest possible version of Xastir, follow the instructions here to install the CVS version.

Install Xastir from CVS

Notes and privileges

It is strongly suggested you read the entire INSTALL file first.

This is not meant to be a replacement for INSTALL - but simply a distro-centric abridgment.
A sort of 'check-list' if you will.

This how-to assumes your system has a working connection to the Internet.

First, you'll need a console (terminal). You can open a console via: Application -> Accessories -> Terminal (Depending on your desktop, you may also find it at: Applications -> System Tools -> Terminal)

su will elevate you to 'root' privileges and leave you in the current directory, but retains the user's environment. Return to 'normal user' privileges by typing 'exit'. If you encounter environment based erros, try "su -" instead. Just be sure to change to your working directory!

sudo followed by a command will grant privileges for just that command, automatically dropping you back to normal privileges when that command is completed. Sudo is generally considered safer than su, but it does need to be setup before you can use it. See the Sudo notes for instructions on setting up sudo. Using sudo respects the same Unix tradition of not logging in as root except when necessary. The Fedora Unity project also has a sudo howto.

'su' is immediately available without any setup, but does - conceivably - carry some risks. Any command you give after using 'su' will be performed with root privileges - until you type exit to return to normal privileges. It's possible you may forget you have root privileges and inadvertently damage your system, it's installed programs or even expose your system to exploit. If you follow this how-to and don't issue any extra commands, you should be fine.

Check your Development Setup

For help installing Fedora see The Fedora 20 install guide - available in several formats. There are also several 'personal setup' guides online, that will help you to customize and configure your Fedora install. One of the more popular ones is mjmwired.net's Personal installation guides,

If by chance, you didn't install Fedora with the required development tools, you'll have to add them in now.
To see if you have them or not. Simply run:

I've removed the actual group listings from that output and replaced them with ::sinpped::. It will be different for every install.
You'll see what groups you have installed. Look through the first part, "Installed Groups". You want to find these 1 group (Fortunately, they're listed in alphabetical order):

Development Tools

If it's not there, install the group with:

sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools" <enter>

Now, to work...

Install required RPM packages

These packages are included in the Fedora repositories and can be installed using Fedora's package management tools. They will also be automatically updated as new versions become available.

Notes

To be used with Xastir, all application packages will require their associated 'devel' packages to be installed. Libraries, by their nature, do not require 'devel' packages.

The 'install' commands require root privileges.

Enter the command 'su' and then give the root password and continue.

Or after setting up sudo (suggested), add sudo to the beginning of each command line.

This first package's install line would become:

sudo rpm -q GraphicsMagick <enter>

Don't be surprised if other packages, dependencies, are installed as well! That's the beauty of using YUM and the RPM system. If something else is needed to make your chosen package work correctly, it will installed at the same time.

I'll go through some detail with the first one. I'll simplify the rest and assume you can follow the pattern.

None of the following command line examples include the shell prompts

[user@localhost ~]$ (user prompt)

[root@localhost ~]# (root prompt)

Packages

GraphicsMagick

You can use either GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick. GraphicsMagick is the Fedora default and currently preferred.
Simply run:

rpm -q GraphicsMagick <enter>

You should get a response similar to:

GraphicsMagick-1.3.14-1.fc16.i686

This tells you GraphicsMagick is installed and exactly what version it is. Exact numbers in the version string may be different
If you get this instead:

Package GraphicsMagick is not installed

Then install it with:

yum -y install GraphicsMagick <enter>

Install GraphicsMagick-devel.

yum -y install GraphicsMagick-devel <enter>

You can combine these steps into one.

If you didn't have GraphicsMagick, you surely don't have GraphicsMagick-devel. Get both like this:

yum -y install GraphicsMagick GraphicsMagick-devel <enter>

I'll be leaving out the <enter> for the rest of the commands. You can safely assume it's there

Note added by KM5VY: If you chose a minimal installation above and left out the Gnome Software Development group (which is large and mostly unnecessary), then you must also install "lcms" and "lcms-devel" here, as they are required by GraphicsMagick and for some reason not pulled in as an automatic dependency.

Festival

Optional: festival provides speech synthesis allowing Xastir to 'talk' to you. Of course, you'll also need a working sound card and speakers.
Install Festival and Festival-devel, if not already present.

rpm -q festival

If not installed, then install festival and it's devel package.

yum -y install festival festival-devel

Libtiff

Verify presence of the libtiff development libraries

rpm -q libtiff-devel

If not installed, install it

yum -y install libtiff-devel

Lesstif

note: In the past, Fedora included OpenMotif, but due to an incompatible license from OpenMotif, Fedora now includes lesstif instead.
CentOS does use openmotif - don't force the install of the lestif-devel libraries or you'll break other things. Just use openmotif-devel on CentOS - works fine.

Verify presence of lesstif

rpm -q lesstif

If present, verify presence of lestif development package

rpm -q lesstif-devel

If either are not present, install whatever is missing

yum -y install lesstif lesstif-devel

PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions)

The DBFAWK capability of xastir requires PCRE. We do not recommend building xastir without DBFAWK capability if you plan on using shapefiles. PCRE will probably not be installed already, so just install it:

yum -y install pcre pcre-devel

Tar balls

These packages are not included in the Fedora repositories, so must be manually installed and updated.

Setup and Preparation

Create/Choose working directory

Change to your to your working directory of choice.
Tradition would suggest /usr/local/src. I use my home directory /home/<username>. You may also make a /source or /src directory most anywhere in the filesystem and use that. Totally up to you where you do this or what you call it. To continue, just make it is your current directory. Use the "pwd" to show your current directly.

ldconfig

ld.so.conf is the configuration file for ldconfig. Find it in the /etc directory.

Use vi, gedit or your favorite text editor to check /etc/ld.so.conf and make any changes as needed.

Verify that /usr/local/lib, /usr/lib, and /usr/X11R6/lib are all listed.

If not, just add each to it's own line. Something like:

/usr/local/lib
/usr/lib
/usr/X11R6/lib
include ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

That last line include ld.so.conf.d/* should already be there.
After all the 'tar ball' sourced libraries are installed, execute ldconfig to update the library cache.

/sbin/ldconfig

This will allow the compiler to find the required libraries on your system.

Get, Compile and install libraries

Some of the following examples include the sudo command. If you already have root privleges, maybe by using su, just leave sudo off the lines below.

The scripts directory in the Xastir source tree (~/xastir/scripts) contains shell scripts that can automate some of these and other functions. Once you have Xastir up and running I suggest exploring those scripts.

The following lines will download the required 'tarball' into your current directory, extract them, build and install the libraries. You can "cut and paste" each line - one at a time - to your console and execute.